Читать книгу Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood - Paul Martin - Страница 18

Why are some people consistently happier than others? Why do we all feel happier at some times than others? Historically, there have been two contrasting schools of thought as to what makes a happy person happy. According to one view, happiness is largely a consequence of what happens to us. It depends on how many pleasant or unpleasant experiences we have, whether we succeed in satisfying our desires, how people behave towards us, how much money we earn, and so on. Set against this is the belief, common to many ancient philosophies and religions, that happiness is essentially a product of how we perceive and construe the world around us – in other words, that happiness is all in the mind and has little to do with external events.

These two very different perspectives on the causes of happiness imply two very different approaches to achieving it. If happiness reflects the world around us, then we should seek to make ourselves happy by changing the world to match our desires – for example, by acquiring pleasurable experiences, possessions, wealth, fame or power. A belief in the ability of material possessions and pleasurable experiences to create happiness is one of the driving forces behind our consumerist culture. If, on the other hand, happiness is all down to our beliefs and attitudes, then we should be able to find it by altering our perception; nothing in the world around us need change.

The alluring idea that happiness is all in the mind has a long history. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle argued that happiness depends not on the external world but on how we perceive it. And because happiness depends on how we think, it can be cultivated. In similar vein, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born in the first century AD, championed a lofty indifference to the hardships and imperfections of life. ‘What upsets people’, he wrote, ‘is not things themselves, but their judgments about the things.’ Epictetus argued that the path to happiness lies in wanting what you have rather than having what you want. Many other ancient schools of thought, including the Yogi, Taoist, Zen and Buddhist traditions, similarly hold that happiness depends on freeing the mind from the malign influence of external events. Strong echoes of this time-honoured view can be found in contemporary self-help books which advise that happiness comes from positive thinking or learning to love ourselves more.

Everyday experience, however, suggests that the reality is less clear cut. Events and circumstances obviously do have some bearing on personal happiness. Most of us would feel better after eating a delicious meal, having fantastic sex, being successful at work or winning a large sum of money. Equally, we might feel downcast if we had just lost all our money, suffered a major career setback, or if a close friend had suddenly died. But events clearly cannot account for more than part of the story, because individuals can respond very differently to identical circumstances. An event that casts one person into gloom might seem trivial to another and a source of amusement to someone else.

Many people manage to be reasonably happy (in the broad sense as defined in chapter 2) despite living in dreadful circumstances. Even severe illness, disability or poverty does not inevitably condemn someone to lasting unhappiness. Research has shown that people living in conditions of extreme poverty in developing nations are sometimes considerably happier than might be expected given their grim physical circumstances. One study of slum-dwellers in Calcutta found that they derived considerable happiness from their relationships with other people. Personal relationships make a huge contribution to personal happiness, but they have little to do with wealth or material possessions. You do not have to be rich to have supportive friends and a loving family.

Similarly, many people with severe illnesses or disabilities are found to be only slightly less happy than averagely healthy people, once they have come to terms with their condition. For instance, one American study found that more than 80 per cent of people who were paralysed in all four limbs considered their lives to be average or above average in terms of happiness, and more than 90 per cent of them were glad to be alive. Another study, which assessed paralysis victims years after their injury, found that those who were receiving good social support from family and friends were about as happy as anyone else. Objectively bad events or circumstances do not automatically condemn us to persistent unhappiness, and good events do not automatically create lasting bliss. The truth is that happiness depends both on what happens to us and how we perceive those events.

The characteristic style in which you interact with the world around you, including other people, is known as your personality. And your personality has a major influence on your happiness for two basic reasons: first, because it shapes your lifestyle and experiences; and second, because it affects how you perceive those experiences.

The experiences you have during the course of your life do not just randomly happen to you: they are to some extent your own creations and depend on your personality. Someone who is highly sociable, outgoing and adventurous is likely to live their life differently from someone who is shy, timid and conservative. Personality also affects how we perceive and construe our experiences. As well as having a larger number of positive experiences, happy people tend to interpret those experiences more positively. For their part, unhappy people have an unfortunate habit of interpreting objectively similar experiences in less positive ways, thereby reinforcing their doleful view of the world and prolonging their unhappiness.

Research suggests that personality has a stronger influence on the emotional elements of happiness (namely, pleasure and displeasure) than it does on the thinking element (satisfaction). Someone may have the sort of personality that makes them feel low much of the time, perhaps because they are shy and anxious. Nonetheless, they may still derive considerable satisfaction from their work and family life, leaving them reasonably happy overall. Personality traits typically remain stable over time, which helps to explain why an individual’s overall level of happiness will also tend to be moderately stable.